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New York
The Empire State, from Manhattan to the Adirondacks
New York is far more than the city that shares its name. The state runs from the densely packed harbor of New York City and Long Island northward into a vast, rugged interior of mountains, lakes, and farmland that few outsiders picture. The Hudson River cuts a deep, fjord-like valley from the harbor up toward Albany — the Catskills and the higher Adirondacks rise to the north and west — and the Great Lakes Erie and Ontario form much of the state's northern and western edge, with Niagara Falls thundering between them.
The geography made New York the great gateway of the continent. The Hudson-Mohawk corridor is the only near-sea-level break through the Appalachian barrier, and the Erie Canal exploited it in 1825 to link the Atlantic with the Great Lakes and the whole interior — the route that built New York City into the nation's commercial capital. The Finger Lakes, gouged by glaciers into long parallel troughs, ripple across the state's center. Mount Marcy, the high point at 5,344 feet (1,629 m), crowns the Adirondacks.
The Adirondack Park, larger than several states, is the biggest protected area in the contiguous United States — a patchwork of public and private land covering six million acres of mountains, forests, and lakes. It exists because 19th-century New Yorkers feared losing the watershed that fed the canals and the city. Far upstate, this is wild country, a striking counterpoint to the metropolis at the river's mouth.
Most of New York's population still clusters in and around New York City, the largest city in the United States and a global capital of finance, media, and culture. But the state's reach — Atlantic harbor, Hudson valley, Great Lakes ports, and mountain wilderness — gives it a geographic range matched by few others east of the Mississippi.
Economy
New York has one of the largest economies of any state, dominated by New York City - the financial capital of the world, home to Wall Street and a global center of media, fashion, advertising, and increasingly technology. Beyond the city, the economy includes substantial higher education and healthcare, tourism, and productive agriculture and dairy across the upstate regions. The state's total output rivals that of large countries.
Politics
New York carries 28 electoral votes and has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1988, its politics dominated by the population and progressive lean of New York City and its suburbs. Upstate regions are more politically mixed and often lean Republican, a long-running urban-rural divide that runs through the state's elections.